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What Is to Be Done?

Renowned Venezuelan writer Luis Britto Garcia echoes Lenin in asking "What Is to Be Done?" at the start one of the most difficult years the Bolivarian revolution has ever faced. Here are his recommendations. 

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Debate what went wrong, how and why. 

Reserve debate for the inner sphere, as all competing accusations and tirades serve to discredit. 

Reaffirm socialism as an ideological base, guide and aim for political organizations.

Select state functionaries and candidates by scrupulously reviewing their career, attainments and council, rather than their personal relationships to or their agreements with the upper echelons (of the revolutionary leadership). 

Assemble schools for political and ideological training.

Repair the corrupt structures that destroy all that they touch.

Investigate, exhaustively, unexplained increases in wealth and external signs of wealth in both the public and private sectors. 

Combat the economic war, in which until now only the aggressor has fought.

Preserve in their posts those functionaries who have actively and effectively applied measures against speculation, hoarding and scarcity.

Assume state control of the importation and distribution of food and basic goods.

Assume state control of the banks.

Stop awarding preferential dollars to businesses that do not employ them for their designated purpose but rather for the destruction of the country.

Clarify that to vote for a referendum would revoke all of the economic, social, cultural and public services we have achieved in fifteen years.

Solicit the Supreme Court to nullify any laws that threaten the principle of irreversibility of those social achievements protected by the constitution. 

Veto by presidential act the laws that deny or destroy our economic, social, political or cultural rights. 

Propose a progressive tax reform and denounce as accomplices any parliamentarians that oppose it.

Establish a price for fuel that at least recoups the cost of production.

Actively support social movements that are struggling against paramilitarism, corruption bachaqueo [reselling], and smuggling.

Communicate that a planetary economic crisis is currently underway, with global scarcity of food, in which the price of hydrocarbons has dropped by over half and the government has reduced its income on the same scale.

Divulge the incomparable economic, social, cultural, educational and political achievements of Bolivarianism and its fulfillment of the [United Nations] Millennium Goals. 

Recall the miserable social, cultural and economic indicators of the past century and those of other countries that fall under neoliberal governments.

Examine meticulously the origin, records, career and activities of possible beneficiaries of social benefits.

Remember that those who are raising prices, hoarding and hiding merchandise are business actors in the Economic War and not the government.

Reveal that over two thousands public functionaries are on trial for corruption.

Recollect that Bolivarianism restored social benefits to workers and if they do not fight for them neoliberalism will take them away again.

Restructure the public media system to uproot its merely reactive practices and convert it into a generator of debate and perspective. 

Stop mimicking the vulgar formats, interruptions, insertions, decorations, conning, and user abuse characterized by capitalist media in our socialist media.

Substitute ephemera such as entertainment events for long-lasting government action. 

Eradicate paramilitarism and it’s cohort, parapolitics.

Maintain rigorous control of border zones to block paramilitaries, resellers and smugglers. 

Rotate regularly and frequently the authorities in control of border zones.

Investigate NGOs and bar those financed by the hostile power which declared Venezuela an extraordinary threat to its security (US). 

Dismiss foreign advisers that have never gained power in their country and may contribute to our losing it in this country.

Abandon all hope of pact, conciliation, or cohabitation with the right wing which has spent the past 16 years trying to assassinate Bolivarianism.

Act instead of declaring that action will be taken.